COMPUTING IN SPACE: It turns out NASA’s Mars helicopter was much more revolutionary than we knew.

“The processor on Ingenuity is 100 times more powerful than everything JPL has sent into deep space, combined,” Tzanetos said. This means that if you add up all of the computing power that has flown on NASA’s big missions beyond Earth orbit, from Voyager to Juno to Cassini to the James Webb Space Telescope, the tiny chip on Ingenuity packs more than 100 times the performance.

A similar philosophy went into other components, such as the rechargeable batteries on board. These are similar to the lithium batteries sold in power tools at hardware stores. Lithium hates temperature cycles, and on the surface of Mars, they would be put through a hellish cycle of temperatures from -130° Fahrenheit (-90° C) to 70° (20° C).

The miracle of Ingenuity is that all of these commercially bought, off-the-shelf components worked. Radiation didn’t fry the Qualcomm computer. The brutal thermal cycles didn’t destroy the battery’s storage capacity. Likewise, the avionics, sensors, and cameras all survived despite not being procured with spaceflight-rated mandates.

“This is a massive victory for engineers,” Tzanetos said.

Indeed it is. While NASA’s most critical missions, where failure is not an option, will likely still use space-rated hardware, Ingenuity’s success opens a new pathway for most science missions. They can be cheaper, lighter, and higher-performing in every way. This is almost unimaginably liberating for mission planners.

Exciting, too.